Programming Odds and Ends

Unlike an asynchronous Ajax call, HTML5 Web workers provide an opportunity to run a Multi-threaded JavaScript code in modern browsers that support them . Each worker spawns an isolated thread with dedicated JavaScript Event Loop, Stack and Heap memory. For example a regular Ajax Call to MVC Web API service call goes through the following asynchronous call cycle. The JavaScript Event Loop in this case could be interrupted by events that are being executed on the UI; for instance, a "window.alert", could possibly stop all scripts on the page from executing until a user responds. Replacing the Ajax Call with HTML5 web worker provides a great way to run long running scripts in separate threads so that asynchronous code execution is not interrupted by UI events. Here is the a JavaScript worker implementation of the same MVC Web API call using a JavaScript web worker. Despite the advantages of using a web worker, implementing one requires working with some constr...